In general, an increasing preoccupation of consumers with nutrition and the potential beneficial effects of foods is nowadays observed in industrialized countries. Several reasons may be advanced:                the worrying frequency of cancers and coronary diseases and the popularization of recent nutritional knowledge,        the mistrust of consumers following the recent crises in the agri-foodstuffs industry,        current demographic trends, which have seen an increase in number in the age range between 45 and 65 years, intensifies this desire for healthy products, which make it possible to live better and longer.        
Accordingly, for many years, great efforts have been made to replace the high-calorie substances in traditional foods. Among them, the ones which are most expensive and with the highest calorie content are quite often sucrose and fat.
Sucrose has been, since the beginning of the food industry, the reference sweetener filler. Its sensory and technological properties make it particularly suited to food products.
On the other hand, its nutritional properties may give rise to criticisms. Indeed, sucrose possesses a calorific value of 4 Kcal/g, which confers on the food product, in which sucrose is the main constituent, a non-negligible calorific value.
In addition, it is known that sucrose is completely contraindicated for diabetics because its constituent glucose is rapidly assimilable by the body, which can generate serious hyperglycaemia in patients. Finally, sucrose is a substrate which can be fermented by commensal oral bacteria, which convert it to corrosive acids responsible for dental caries.
To overcome these disadvantages, it has been devised, for example, in the documents EP-A-0 390 299 and EP-A-0 512 910, to replace sucrose with polyols in some food products. These polyols may be in particular hydrogenated monosaccharides such as sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, erythritol or hydrogenated disaccharides such as maltitol, lactitol, hydrogenated isomaltulose (equimolar mixture of 1,6-glucopyranosyl-sorbitol and 1,1-glucopyranosylmannitol).
In the pure state, these polyols have no reducing power and are not fermented by the oral flora to acids. They therefore allow the manufacture of noncariogenic food products since the other ingredients in the formulation do not supply fermentable sugars. In addition, polyols are slowly metabolized and do not cause, after their consumption, a sharp increase in the blood glucose level. Consequently, they are often recommended in the diet of diabetics.
Furthermore, the calorific value is estimated on average at 2.4 Kcal/g (10.0 KJ/g), that is about 60% that of sugar. However, as regards calorie reduction, it can only be observed that it still remains limited for foods containing polyols currently marketed, this being for the simple reason that to the calorific value of the sweetening mass is added the much higher one of fat which generally constitutes another main ingredient of food products.
This fat generally exists in the form of triglycerides. Its calorific value is 9 Kcal/g. Furthermore, it is essentially in saturated form. It is not therefore particularly recommended by nutritionists and goes against the current concern of consumers, which is to limit the excessive supply of calories by the diet.
To address this concern, it would therefore be advisable to replace all or part of the sucrose with a low-calorie substitute, but also to reduce all or part of the quantity of fat.